Armchair anger is not enough

One evening last week, I was on Twitter making small talk with some friends, having a laugh, trying to wind down after a hard day at work.

Then someone I follow decided to spend the evening inviting people to share experiences of poverty, and retweeting them. This appeared to find approval among a lot of people, who made comments such as 'This is what Twitter is for'.

I unfollowed him.

Facebook tramples on graves

Dear Facebook

Please stop trying to be clever and start thinking about real people’s real feelings.

You have the biggest customer base in the world and you have no concept of customer service. You don’t even have any way of contacting a customer service person.

I don’t want to ‘engage’ with you. I don’t want to follow you on Twitter or ‘like’ your page (I DON’T ‘like’ you) or ‘share’ a user story about how Facebook has changed my life. (‘We are always interested in hearing from our users’: I don’t think so).

I just want to tell someone – a real person – that you have screwed up.

And I don’t want you to tell me how to ‘engage’ with the site. I don’t need you to tell me who my friends are or how to talk to them. And I don’t want you selecting random photos of me and telling me what to do with them.

Yesterday I logged on to Facebook and there was one of my photos with the heading ‘Tag a friend’. A face was highlighted and underneath it said ‘Whose face is this?’

It’s my dead sister. I posted that photo as a tribute on her 20th anniversary.

She is not on Facebook.